The Bloody Crown of Conan

by Robert E. Howard

  One passage from the Tombalku story, however, may have inspired the Texan for the subject of his novel:

  One of the men, his face smooth and unlined, but his hair silver, was saying: “Aquilonia? There was an invasion – we heard – King Bragorus of Nemedia – how went the war?”

  “He was driven back,” answered Amalric briefly, resisting a shudder. Nine hundred years had passed since Bragorus led his spearmen across the marches of Aquilonia.

  Here was the springboard for the plot of The Hour of the Dragon: an invasion of Aquilonia by its neighbor Nemedia. The seven mysterious horsemen were also probably transformed into The Hour of the Dragon’s four sorcerors from Khitai. Amra, Conan’s alias when he was a pirate among the black corsairs, also made the jump from the draft to the novel, and the theme of the rival kings is obviously an essential ingredient to the novel. Much of this material had already furnished the background to an early Conan story, The Scarlet Citadel, part of the initial lot of stories sent to England, which featured Conan as Amra and an invasion (from Koth and Ophir in this case). Xaltotun’s resurrection is highly reminiscent of Thugra Khotan’s, in Black Colossus, though this particular tale had not been among the lot sent to England in mid-1933.

  Howard knew what he should do with The Hour of the Dragon and how he should be doing it: he was at the same time recycling several elements from his past Conan stories and trying to conquer a new readership. He had thus to present as much as possible of his Hyborian Age and its possibilities to his intended new readers, and also should have no compunction about recycling several elements from former Conan stories, since the British market was averse to publishing short stories. The reader would thus have hints of Stygia, of the Hyborian Age equivalents to the African kingdoms, would even get a glimpse – by way of the mysterious sorcerors – of the countries east of Vilayet, in a tale which remained, however, centered on the Hyborian countries he would be familiar with: the kingdoms corresponding to modern occidental Europe.

  It had been a long time since Howard had written of Conan as a king and one could wonder why he chose to return to a theme which had long disappeared from his stories. The answer probably resides once again in the novel’s intended market. The British public had always been keenly interested in the subject of mythical kings and so had been Howard himself: hadn’t he, in The Phoenix on the Sword, written about a king who wins his battle aided by a magic sword quite similar to Excalibur? Hadn’t he, in The Scarlet Citadel, written that the king is one with his kingdom, and that he who slays the king cuts the cords of the kingdom? Was King Conan ready to acknowledge his kinship with the most famous Celtic King of all, Arthur?

  In The Scarlet Citadel, Conan’s capture was achieved through treachery and his eventual victory was mostly a matter of superior military strategy. In the novel, Conan’s paralysis has a distinctive supernatural origin and Howard insists on what has really transpired when Xaltotun prevented Conan from taking part in the battle. With Conan’s paralysis, an essential link has been broken by magic: Conan has been severed from his army and it was this which led to its defeat. As Pallantides declares shortly thereafter: “Only [Conan] could have led us to victory this day.” With the apparent death of Conan, king of Aquilonia, the unity and strength of Aquilonia disappears. As a partisan will later tell Conan, in words closely echoing the proverb from The Scarlet Citadel: “You were the cord that held the fagots together. When the cord was cut, the fagots fell apart.” It is only Conan’s presumed death that enables Valerius to get on the throne: “So long as Conan lives, he is a threat, a unifying factor for Aquilonia” declares Tarascus. “Only in unity is there strength,” later echoes Conan. Valerius, in spite of his military victory, doesn’t succeed in restoring the lost unity of the kingdom and obtaining the allegiance of the people. Echoes Conan: “It’s one thing to seize a throne with the aid of its subjects and rule them with their consent. It’s another to subjugate a foreign realm and rule it by fear.” Conan appears to have been the rightful king to Aquilonia and only magic could defeat the unity that existed between him and his people.

  It was not the Heart of Ahriman that brought about the defeat of Conan. The Heart is not an instrument of evil. Hadrathus, priest of Asura, later confirms that “against it the powers of darkness cannot stand, when it is in the hands of an adept… It restores life, and can destroy life. [Xaltotun] has stolen it, not to use it against his enemies, but to keep them from using it against him,” and concluding with: “[The Heart] holds the destiny of Aquilonia.” Why does the Heart hold the destiny of Aquilonia? At the beginning of the novel, we learn that the jewel “was hidden in a cavern below the temple of Mitra, in Tarantia.” The symbolism is obvious: the Heart, as its name would suggest, was placed at the heart, in the center, of the kingdom. Furthermore, Mitraism is the Hyborian Age’s closest equivalent to an organized religion, the official religion of Aquilonia, as well as the better structured of the Hyborian cults; hence its “central” position. Tarantia requires some discussing. In The Scarlet Citadel, the capital of Aquilonia is called Tamar; it is called Tarantia in the novel. Howard’s changing of the name was no “egregious blunder” as certain editors would have it, but the result of a careful choice: Tarantia is derived from Tara, mystical and political capital of Ireland, seen as the heart of their kingdom by the Celts of Ireland: “You will not press the throne again unless you find the heart of your kingdom,” says Zelata to Conan, to which he replies: “Do you mean the city of Tarantia?” The Heart is thus the mystical stone that symbolizes the exact center of the country, the symbol of the link that unites the people and the land to the king. Once this link is severed “the heart is gone from [the] kingdom.” The consequences are dire and immediate for the people and the country:

  only embers and ashes showed where farm huts and villas had stood... A vast swath of desolation had been cut through the country from the foothills westward. Conan cursed as he rode thorough blackened expanses that had been rich fields, and saw the gaunt gable-ends of burned houses jutting out the sky. He moved through an empty and deserted land.

  All this is perfectly logical, for in tales of the Grail the country becomes a barren land, the wasteland, from the moment the king cannot properly govern his kingdom anymore: the consequences of Conan’s defeat at the hand of the conspirators go far beyond the capture and destitution of the Cimmerian. The problem in The Hour of the Dragon is that Conan seems at first unaware of the mystic bond which links him to his country. His will to get the throne back from his enemies is doomed from the start and even his most loyal subjects refuse to follow him in what they consider a suicidal enterprise. Only when Conan has understood everything can the quest begin: “What a fool I’ve been! The Heart of Ahriman! The heart of my kingdom! Find the heart of my kingdom, Zelata said.”

  It is thus at about the central point of the story that Howard’s novel reveals itself as a quest, and more precisely as an Arthurian-like quest for the Grail. Behind the Arthurian legendry one finds the obsession of the Celts with the common king they historically never had, the one who was to unite the tribes against common foes. This king, a rex, as opposed to the Roman notion of imperator, permanent representative of a strong and centralized power, was most of the time a military leader. And what Howard is telling us is exactly that: Conan’s quest for the Heart is a quest for the perfect way to fulfill his duty as a rex and not as an imperator, as a tyrant. This is clearly demonstrated in the exchange between Conan and Trocero in the middle section of the book:

  “Then let us unite Zingara with Poitain,” argued Trocero. “Half a dozen princes strive against each other, and the country is torn asunder by civil wars. We will conquer it, province by province, and add it to your dominions. Then with the aid of the Zingarans we will conquer Argos and Ophir. We will build an empire –”

  Again Conan shook his head. “Let others dream imperial dreams. I but wish to hold what is mine. I have no desire to rule an empire welded together by blood and fire. It’s one thing to
seize a throne with the aid of its subjects and rule them with their consent. It’s another to subjugate a foreign realm and rule it by fear. I don’t wish to be another Valerius. No, Trocero, I’ll rule all Aquilonia and no more, or I’ll rule nothing.” (pg. 168)

  Whoever had the idea of retitling Howard’s novel Conan the Conqueror had evidently not understood its theme: Conan is anything but a conqueror by nature. If Conan’s kingship has to be envisioned as a conclusion of sorts to his life, then the lesson is one entirely different from what has been suggested for years: Conan the King has much less freedom and power (to act as he wants) than Conan the Cimmerian.

  If Conan is an Arthur, we might wonder where his Guinevere is. The queen played a very special role in Celtic countries, and her absence in Howard’s novel could seem surprising, at least to a reader unfamiliar with the Cimmerian. Many Weird Tales readers must have experienced a jolt when reading that Conan vowed to marry Zenobia at the end of the novel. One wonders, and indeed several critics have wondered, if Conan would be true to his word. We have no way to answer such a question, though we can note that Zenobia’s crowning would bring the novel even closer to the Arthurian myth.

  In fact each of the three women of the story – Zenobia, Zelata and Albiona – seem to embody part of the symbolic role assigned to the Arthurian queen. Zenobia (whose name was Sabina in the early drafts of the novel) is the one supposed to be married (soon) to the king. Zelata is in charge of the initiation aspects of the quest: she is the one who helps Conan understand the symbolism of the Heart of Ahriman, of the link between the king and his kingdom. Albiona was given a name and a rank which help us identify the three women of the novel as a composite picture of the Arthurian queen. She is of course a member of the nobility, but it is the etymology of her name which betrays her, for Albiona is derived from alba, latin for white. Arthur’s wife was of distinct Celtic origin: gwen, the radical behind all the variants of the name of King Arthur’s wife (Guinevere, Guenièvre, Gwenhwyfar, etc., Gaelic: finn) means white (and by extension: fair).

  The Hyborian Age’s equivalent to the quest for the Grail is then found in the ensuing chapters of the novel, when Conan has discovered the importance and the role of the Heart of Ahriman. These various picaresque episodes offer a succession of adventures and battles also found in most of the Arthurian texts. This is the origin for the episodes of the castle of Valbroso and the ghouls in the forest, of Publio, of the ship’s mutiny, of Khemi and of Akivasha, which, strictly speaking, don’t add anything to the story, so much that Karl Wagner could suppose that one chapter may have been lost here in the transition between the English publisher and the pages of Weird Tales, a loss that no one would have noticed.

  Conan’s return to his throne begins with his securing of the Heart of Ahriman. This is achieved at the end of chapter 19: “[Conan] whirled about his head the great jewel, which threw off splashes of light that spotted the deck with golden fire.” The next chapter opens: “Winter had passed from Aquilonia. Leaves sprang out on the limbs of trees, and the fresh grass smiled to the touch of the warm southern breezes.” With the heart once back in proper hands, life is restored, the wasteland once more becomes a land of plenty, of the Grail: “But in the full flood of spring a sudden whisper passed over the sinking kingdom that woke the land to eager life.” This image of the country returning to life with the riding back of the holders of the Grail irresistibly calls to mind a similar scene in John Boorman’s Excalibur. Xaltotun’s defeat is now but a matter of time. The conspirators are divided, while Conan’s forces unite again. The restoration of the king and the land is now inevitable.

  Howard was definitely writing his novel with his public in mind and it is probably not a coincidence that the story contains homages to British writers. The beginning of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel very probably furnished the idea for the plague episode in Howard’s novel. More importantly, he was once more paying homage to one of his favorite playwrights, Shakespeare, whose Hamlet seems to have been very present with Howard at composition time: “There is method in his madness” in chapter 3 is a clear echo of the dramatist’s most famous play. (Howard definitely wanted this phrase to appear in his novel, as it appeared in three instances in the second draft of the novel!) In fact, many of Howard’s tales dealing with kingship invite comparison with the play. In the case of The Hour of the Dragon, the parallels are evident, with both tales centering on the exploits of a king (or would-be king) deposed by an usurper whom he would have thought an ally! Conan, dispossessed of his throne and dead (or believed so) had in fact all the qualities of the Danish ghost-king. Upon seeing Conan, whom he believes dead, a Poitanian soldier waxes Shakespearean and we could for a space believe ourselves on the battlements of Elsinore: “His breath hissed inward and his ruddy face paled. ‘Avaunt!’ he ejaculated. ‘Why have you come back from the gray lands of death to terrify me? I was always your true liegeman in your lifetime –’”

  The Hour of the Dragon is by far the Howard story for which we have the greatest number of draft pages. In addition to the 241 pages of the published version, 620 pages of drafts survive, while several hundred others (a carbon of the definitive version and at least one complete draft) were lost over the years. Howard wrote five versions of his story, with several parts of these rewritten two or three times. While he would tell others that the stories came easily to him, he was working at it much harder than he would care to admit. The story’s synopsis provides an excellent sample of Howard’s working method: running three dense single-spaced pages, it covers the first five chapters in minute detail with only a few variations from the published version, while the subsequent chapters are much less detailed and the second part of the novel not covered at all. Howard built his first drafts from this, testing his scenes and dialogues. Xaltotun’s motivations for sparing Conan thus changed several times as Howard was writing his drafts and getting a better grasp of his characters and how they would act and interact when confronted with certain situations. The passage in which Tiberias sacrifices himself by leading Valerius and five thousand men to a deathly trap in the gorges was added in the last stages of writing, offering the reader some memorable moments and infusing the end of the novel with a sense of suspense and incertitude which it would otherwise be lacking.

  The study of the typescripts shows that Howard didn’t begin work on his Conan novel until after he had finished both The People of the Black Circle and a detective story received by his agent on March 10. Chances are that he didn’t actually begin it until after he had sent another story to his agent circa March 17. It was only apt that such a novel was begun at the time of Saint Patrick’s Day. Records show that Howard’s agent didn’t receive anything from him between March 19 and June 20. If we accept March 17, give or take a couple of days, as the beginning date of the writing of the novel, then The Hour of the Dragon was written in less than two months: on May 20, 1934, Howard wrote Denis Archer in England: “As you doubtless remember, in your letter of Jan. 9th, 1934, you suggested that I submit a full length novel, on the order of the weird short stories formerly submitted, to your allied company of Pawling & Ness Ltd. Under separate cover I am sending you a 75,000 word novel, entitled, The Hour of the Dragon, written according to your suggestions. Hoping it will prove acceptable…”

  During those two months, Howard apparently didn’t write any other story, concentrating all his efforts on his novel, with an estimated output of 5,000 words per day, seven days a week. On May 20, the day he sent the novel to England, Howard wrote four short letters. The Hour of the Dragon had occupied almost all of his time for those two months. Edgar Hoffmann Price’s brief visit in April seems to have been the sole distraction during those two months. For someone who was not expecting much from the British market, two full months of work seems an awful lot. One suspects that Howard had much more faith and hope in his novel than he was ready to admit. He knew that if the novel was to be accepted – and published – it could be a major, perhaps the major, break f
or him.

  As could be expected, Howard took a few days off in June: “Having completed several weeks of steady work, I’m knocking off a few hours for relaxation and to try to catch up with my correspondence which I’ve allowed to stack up outrageously.” Howard took a short vacation and visited the Carlsbad caverns, which were to inspire him for one of his next Conan stories, but he soon found himself back to work and back to Conan. Only a few days had elapsed between the completion of The People of the Black Circle and the beginning of The Hour of the Dragon. The delay was very probably the same between The Hour of the Dragon and his next Conan story.

  A Witch Shall Be Born was written in late May or early June 1934, probably in a matter of days. The tale was evidently intended to replenish Farnsworth Wright’s stock of Conan stories. In April 1934, Wright had published Iron Shadows in the Moon, Queen of the Black Coast had followed in May, and Howard knew that The Devil in Iron and The People of the Black Circle were scheduled for the August 1934 and subsequent issues, leaving him with no new Conan stories awaiting publication in the pages of Weird Tales. This was a new situation for the Texan, since Iron Shadows in the Moon and Queen of the Black Coast had been written and sold in 1932. Wright was accepting Conan stories as fast as he could get them, and was now almost systematically granting them the privileges of the cover (Queen of the Black Coast, The Devil in Iron, The People of the Black Circle, and A Witch Shall Be Born, published in a seven-month span, were all cover-featured). Conan’s popularity was growing, and the character was very probably attracting new readers to Weird Tales. Women wrote to the magazine, asking for more Conan, whom they envisioned, thanks in part to Wright’s censoring hands, as a romantic barbarian. A Witch Shall Be Born required only two drafts before Howard was satisfied with it. That it matched Wright’s expectations exactly there can be no doubt. In a letter to Robert H. Barlow dated July 5, 1934, Howard wrote: “Here, at last, is the ms. I promised you some time ago. A Witch Shall Be Born. It is my latest Conan story, and Mr. Wright says my best.”